Old South

In this deeply researched and well-written study, Donald P. McNeilly examines how moderately wealthy planters and sons of planters immigrated into the virtually empty lands of Arkansas, seeking their fortune and to establish themselves as the leaders of a new planter aristocracy west of the Mississippi River. These men, sometimes alone, sometimes with family, and usually with slaves, sought the best land possible, cleared it, planted their crops, and erected crude houses and other buildings.

Alabama endured warfare, slave trading, squatting, and speculating on its path to becoming America’s 22nd state, and Daniel S. Dupre brings its captivating frontier history to life in Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. Dupre’s vivid narrative begins when Hernando de Soto first led hundreds of armed Europeans into the region during the fall of 1540. Although this early invasion was defeated, Spain, France, and England would each vie for control over the area’s natural resources.

Harry and Sasha found their dream, a beautiful small ranch in an unspoilt valley nestling beneath the Teton Mountains in Wyoming. It's perfect. Except for the neighbours, an apparently cute old couple, who have some truly crazed ideas about a timeless spirit which asserts its power over the valley in different terrifying ways, with the coming of each different season. The only thing for Harry and Sasha to do, obviously, is to forget about the weirdos and start building their new life in their new home. As they look forward to the arrival of spring.

Within this audiobook, the listener will meet a 19-year-old Texas Ranger figuratively dying to shoot his gun. He does get to shoot at people, but soon realizes what he thought was a bargain, exacted a steep price. Another tale is of an old-school cowman who shut down illicit traffic in stolen livestock that had existed for years on the Llano Estacado. He was tough, salty, and had no quarter for cow thieves, or sympathy for any mealy-mouthed politicians. He cleaned house, maybe not too nicely, but he was unarguably successful.

From the onset of the war, Basil L. Gildersleeve, native of Charleston, South Carolina, a scholar, and professor of Greek at the University of Virginia left his students every Spring to return to the army until he was wounded during a skirmish in the Shenadoah Valley in 1864. Thirty years later he authored The Creed of the Old South, and A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War included in this audiobook.

For over eighty years, tourists have flocked to Natchez, Mississippi, seeking the "Old South," but what they encounter is invention: a pageant and rewrite of history first concocted during the Great Depression. Paul Hardin Kapp explores how meaning is assigned to place and how meaning evolves over time. In showing how and why the Natchez buildings of the "Old South" were first preserved, commercialized, and transformed into a brand, this volume makes a much-needed contribution to debates over the meaning attached to cultural patrimony.

Coin Street Chronicles is a memoir that paints a picture of Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, as seen though the eyes of one for whom it was the backdrop of her childhood. The story is set in and around Coin Street, on the south bank of the River Thames. The area is now a cultural showcase known as The South Bank, but was then a gritty, Cockney-like corner of London.

John Snyder's memoir of growing up the the Depression era south evokes a time gone by. It is written with affection and non-judgmental understanding of people dealing with hard times, sometimes with cruelty, sometimes with violence, including an unsolved case of arson that changed the author's life. In three parts, it is about early childhood among North Carolina mountaineers, living for a time with two eccentric aunts, and growing up on a sharecropper farm before the author went away to the University of Chicago.